Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Pop Rocks

This weekend I am hoping to go and see the new traveling exhibit at the Leonardo museum in downtown Salt Lake City. The exhibit is called “Dead Sea Scrolls: Life and Faith in Ancient Times “. It purportedly features twenty of the Dead Sea Scrolls, displayed ten at a time, and an actual chunk of stone from the western wall of the temple mount. Salt Lake City is the fifth of what may be ten American cities which will be host to the traveling exhibit.

I like the idea that they have included a chunk of rock from the temple mount. I remember how, as a child, I saw an actual moon rock specimen at the Smithsonian in Washington DC. It was held up by stiff wires in artful illumination at the heart of a clear display case made especially for it. When I finally got to see it a line of people impatiently wanted for me to cut my glance short and move on, but I wanted to stare at it for my entire life. It was small, and it looked like so many rocks, but I could see space and rockets and amazing adventure in the way the light escaped into the darkness of its surface. The rock from temple mount is just like the moon rock, except bigger, and instead of the awesomeness of space travel it embodies centuries of religious warfare, and it is actually magic.

The dead sea scrolls were first discovered about 15 miles away and a few months after the 1946 King David Hotel bombing in Jerusalem. 91 people were killed and 46 injured in what remains one of the deadliest bombings in the history of middle-east terrorism. The Zionist group called Irgun bombed the hotel in an attack against the British control of Palestine. Zionists had been fighting for a “Jewish Homeland” in Palestine since long before the Nazi gas chambers were put into operation. One cannot help but wonder how the history of 20th century would be different if they had succeeded before the concentration camps were opened for business.

To many Zionists the British control of Palestine was a bigger concern than what was happening across the Mediterranean Sea in Europe. One group called “Lehi” split off from Irgun before WW II erupted. Lehi attempted to ally with fascist Italy and the Nazis against the British. By 1942 it became clear that the Nazis were not going to be the best allies for a Jewish state and Lehi, under new leadership, decided to ally itself with Joseph Stalin and the USSR. History would eventually suggest that this was also a bad idea. In 1983 one of Lehi’s wartime leaders (Yitzhak Shamir) became prime minister of Israel.

Lehi is also the name of the original Mormon from the book of Mormon. Lehi is supposed to have walked past the Dead Sea Scroll caves in Nahal Qumran sometime around 600 BCE, and then down the coast of the red sea to Oman where he built a boat and sailed to South America. Lehi and his progeny proceeded to have all sorts of wacky adventures in the new world. All of this supposedly ended about year 421 when Moroni wrote down the words of his father Mormon on a stack of gold plates, and buried them along with some magic stones and a sword on a hillside near Palmyra New York.

A little over 1400 years later Joseph smith would “retrieve” the golden Moroni plates and stones from Hill Cumorah. The stones would function as magical spectacles which Smith would use to “translate” the writing on the gold plates from “Reformed Egyptian” into a very KJB-sounding English. In fact the second book of Nephi contains 18 chapters of the book of Isaiah almost word-for-word from the King James Bible.

The Great Isaiah scroll discovered in 1947 in Nahal Qumram is the best preserved of the biblical dead sea scrolls. The scroll is dated to about 125 BCE. I hope it will be part of the exhibit when I walk through.

The Great Isaiah scroll, like every existing piece of ancient writing, is not written in “Reformed Egyptian” so magic stones are not needed to translate it. It has, however, been a long time since I studied Hebrew in college. Luckily the exhibit does have that magic stone as one of its items. Perhaps I can get a new translation?

Followers

About Me

I am an adult onset atheist. I cannot blame parents, society, or an unhappy childhood on my decision to abandon all things theist. I clung for a while to a deist god, but it too was eventually thrown onto the trash-heap. Why insist that I am believing in a “god” when “gravity” or “electromagnetic radiation” are better names? I finally found that I was clinging to the weakest shadow of a deist god because I connected the belief in this imaginary entity with so many good things in the world. One day I realized that those good things would be better without the residue of a belief in god contaminating them.